(In Roman mythology each man has his Genius and each woman her Juno, a sort of tutelar god, a prefiguration, perhaps, of the guardian angel. Even goddesses have their Juno: there is a Juno of the goddess Virtue. In Haitian Voodoo the loas are spirits neither good nor evil: it all depends on how we treat them.)

During our morning stroll along the beach of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, the Cambodian writer told me that one of his Master’s favorite texts ran more or less like this, if he remembered right:

Would I bear a confrontation with my Genius?
Shouldn’t I run away in shame
Of my worst moments?
Is he my Guardian Angel or my Judge?

Genius, here I am at the end of a life
In which I’d like to redress much useless suffering—
How can you help me?

Is it possible to redraw the whole from scratch?

I take your silence
As, once more,
The confirmation
Of my recalcitrant naïveté.

All lives are only drafts:
I realize this late,
As usual.
But I rejoice anyway
Because I’m able to sketch
A new page
At the brink
Of the silver night.

The sea is silent,
Like an ashen sheet
And the way to redress
(here I forgot some lines)
……………………..

Is redress possible?
Or is it only the now which makes sense,
Its ephemeral fireworks burning in the boundless night?

In this strange world
Many things are laughable,
Like when I waste time
With a clip trying to organize some papers.
Then I laugh at myself
When I think of the untold beings
Who are alive at this moment,
Of the ones who have been,
Of the ones who will be,
Of this world in just a little while.

How many are now reading Confucius
Instead of organizing some papers with a clip?

(Here we were interrupted by a call from the UN mission, calling us to a routine meeting.)

Rodolfo Mattarollo, an Argentine lawyer, defended political prisoners during his country’s military dictatorships and was forced into exile, in France, during the latest military regime (1976-83). Returned to Argentina with the return of democracy in 1984, but went abroad again with a number of human rights missions sponsored by the UN. He now works for Argentina’s Office for Human Rights. He has published poems before, as well as translations of contemporary poetry.